Life of a Front-End Developer

Every time I see the following words I remember those days back before college when I wanted to be an Architect.

According to the dictionary, an Architect is “a person who designs buildings and advises in construction projects”. For me, wanting to be an Architect was just the beginning of my journey; yet I found that there was something more that would fulfill my life than just house designing or building constructions. Designing, looking for simplicity, and giving advice would become part of my life as an UX designer.

It all started when I began to notice how complex it was to do a lot of daily tasks such as bank transactions, monthly payments, project management, designing, finding a store in a huge shopping center… you name it. Then many people with my perception began to make a difference in the world creating web tools to simplify those daily tasks. Everyday there was something new on the web, something extraordinary. But at this point I was just being part of it, I was the user and I was not contributing to improve the user experience. Eventually, I started looking for ways to simplify even more those solutions, because I noticed that…

…people are not on the web to enjoy web designs, but to get something done.
–Jakob Nielsen

I registered on dozens of web sites claiming to simplify my daily tasks, and they did –but not entirely–. Web design was not a clear standard, everybody was able to create something with a little research, and therefore many people were contributing different principles, ideas, knowledge, and experiences. I followed them and hosted my first web server to publish content for entertainment and simple solutions. It was not enough, I was part of the group…

…doing the same things over and over again expecting different results.
–Albert Einstein

Today, many people like to entertain using the Internet, but there is also another huge group looking for tools to do a particular task easily and quickly. Banking, Time-entry, Project Management, Budgeting are only a few of them. I have spent more than seven (7) years working for companies to provide solutions for different needs. I have worked in areas such as Electronic Invoice Submission, Digitization of Historic Documents, Point of Sales (POS), Time and Attendance, and Emergency Room (ER). I had the opportunity to work in both worlds: Consulting and Product Companies. None of them seem to care so much in User Interface (UI) aspects and that’s the reason of so many variations and user complaints.

In all those years I have notice a lack of standards in the industry of software development. Everybody wants to be at the top and provide best solutions for the people’s need. More and more industries have “successfully” accomplished their commitment. However, common requirements –complaints– among people is simplicity, performance, and nice look and feel. Important companies such as Apple, Windows, and Google are changing the way web applications are created. All of them started to replace their User Interface (UI) to use flat designs, because it performs fast, it’s clean and organized. More important, Google created Material Design as an initiative to standardize how web applications should look and behave. I follow that ideal, because it is the only way we can provide a better experience; if we all communicate in the same language.

Now that I’m back as a consultant in another company that works in so many areas, I have a great opportunity to explore deeper into this world and get the most of it to create better solutions every day. Now my focus is to find and put together an excellent UI framework that helps simplify the development, automate tests and make deployment easier.